Sleep Awake: A Descent Into Hallucinated Horror

By Mike | HJTV Presents! | Tribeca Festival 2025 | Feature

“This game is going to creep into your nightmares!”

That’s what I said walking out of the Sleep Awake booth at Tribeca Festival’s Games Gallery and I stand by it. I had the chance to play 30 minutes of the demo and sit down with co-creator Cory Davis, Production Director Jen Tonon, and Managing Director Tracy Frazier of Eyes Out Studio. What they’re building with Sleep Awake, in collaboration with Blumhouse Games, isn’t just a horror title. It’s a sensory breakdown, a descent into a beautifully rotting mindscape where terror bleeds through the seams of reality itself.

Set in the last city on Earth, Sleep Awake drops you into a world where no one dares to sleep because those who do are swallowed by The HUSH, an unexplained force causing people to vanish. You play as Katja, navigating a fractured society ruled by death cults, rogue experiments, and paramilitary zealots, united by a single fear: sleep. Or more precisely, what follows.

The game is a full-on audiovisual assault. In the demo, I slipped between a derelict, steel-and-blood city drowning in paranoia and a dreamlike parallel world crafted in vivid pinks, reds, and hallucinatory overlays. The way Eyes Out employs mixed media, especially the haunting FMV overlays and glitchy film segments, makes every transition between worlds feel like a panic attack bleeding through a fever dream.

Reviewers have called the experience “borderline hallucinogenic,” and it’s absolutely accurate. This isn’t horror with jump scares. It’s a kind of dream-logic dread—ambient, creeping, and deeply personal. It’s the kind of game where even silence feels violent.

I have to give credit where it’s due and Robin Finck (Nine Inch Nails) is crafting one of the most unsettling soundscapes in modern horror gaming. The score doesn’t just accompany the visuals, it corrupts them. In my interview, Cory Davis and Jen Tonon emphasized that Sleep Awake isn’t driven by a linear narrative alone. Its this type of design philosophy, which is rooted in themes of altered states and existential terror, that pushes the player into questioning what’s real.

Source: Steam

Sleep Awake isn’t here to just scare you, it wants to unravel you. It’s a game built on trauma, paranoia, and the weaponization of media. Imagine Jacob’s Ladder, Control, and a Black Mirror episode getting swallowed by the Nine Inch Nails discography. That’s the pulse of Sleep Awake.

And with Blumhouse Games stepping into the interactive horror space, this title feels like a statement. This is the direction horror is heading: hybrid media, immersive dread, psychological decay. I don’t say this lightly—Sleep Awake might be one of the most visionary horror games in years.

So consider this a warning and a recommendation….

When Sleep Awake drops, don’t play it before bed. You might not wake up the same.